428 A. The following are cases illustrating my hypothesis of "psychical invasion." The first is taken from Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 105. In this case, the words heard were vividly imagined by the agent, and may very probably have been uttered, or half-uttered. The account is from Mr. J. Pike, of 122 Stockwell Park Road, S.W.

October 1883. Travelling some years since from Carlisle to Highbury, by the night mail train, and finding myself alone in my compartment, I lay at full length on the seat with a view to sleep, having previously requested the guard to wake me at the Camden Town Station. I soon fell into a deep sleep, one of those profound slumbers the awakening from which is almost painful. Roused suddenly by the guard waking me (somewhat roughly and impatiently, because the train was behind its time), I found that I had been dreaming (what proved indeed to be the case) that it was morning; that I was at home, in my bedroom, in the act of dressing, and at the moment of awakening had been on the landing and twice called the servant by her name, " Sarah," and asked her to bring me some hot water.

On actually arriving at home, I learnt that at the time when I had been thus dreaming that I was calling to the servant, she had heard her name called by me twice, distinctly; that - forgetting for the moment that I was not in the house - she, hastily discontinuing the breakfast preparations, ran upstairs, and afterwards came down again "as white as a ghost" - according to the description given to me by the children who, with astonishment, witnessed her proceedings, and not having themselves heard the call, naturally wondered what it all meant. Sarah subsequently informed me that the "fright" she experienced on realising the fact that I was not there had made her " quite ill".

Mr. Pike's daughter gave the following corroboration on October 30th, 1883: -

I distinctly remember the incident of our servant being frightened by hearing my father's voice calling from upstairs, at a time when we knew he could not be anywhere near our home. The servant took a poker in her hand and went upstairs, thinking there must be some man there who had imitated my father's voice. Nothing, however, was discovered to explain the mystery until my father's arrival at home, when he told us that at the time the call was heard he had been dreaming that he was at home and calling for hot water.

Alma M. Pike.

The genuineness of this case does not, of course, depend on the servant's evidence, but on the testimony of Miss Pike that the servant mentioned her experience before Mr. Pike's arrival. Gurney observes that his collection of purely subjective hallucinations includes several instances where a servant has seemed to hear her mistress calling her - a fact which of course goes to weaken the force of the described coincidence. But the superior vividness of the impression in the present instance seems proved by the emotion and alarm which followed it, and which had no sort of parallel in the purely subjective cases referred to.

Here, it will be seen, the condition of the agent was not one of distress or crisis, but simply that of vivid dream; and the case is in this way exceptional. It should be noted that the part of the dream which apparently affected the percipient took place in the very shock of waking; and such a shock, though not critical or exactly painful, clearly involves a far wider and more sudden change of psychical condition than often occurs to us during waking life.

See also a case given in Phantasms, vol. ii. p. 159. Mr. T. W. Smith relates that his wife told him she had dreamt of finding herself in a house in which she used to live, where she saw a friend of hers going to bed. She went up to her, took her by the hand, and said, "Bessie, let us be friends." Some months later, Mr. Smith was informed by a friend of "Bessie's " that one night, about that time, "Bessie" had told her that she had seen Mrs. Smith - that she had touched her and said, "Let us be friends." They were not, however, able to fix the dates with complete certainty, so that the coincidence was doubtful, and the case is evidentially weak for this reason.